Everything in David Foster Wallace’s life happened quickly.
He wrote his first novel,The
Broom of the System, in well under a year, as one of his two undergraduatesummatheses (his philosophy thesis has now
been published too). He wrote the bulk of his massive, generation-definingInfinite Jestin about three years. And after going
through more artistic and personal regenerations than would seem possible for
one single writer in one single lifetime, he died far, far too young. When I
interviewed Wallace in 1997 (click here to read a full transcript of the interview), he was wholly ascendant as the representative
writer of his time, and it’s dizzying to think that less than a dozen years
later he’d be dead—and that just a few years afterward his first biography
would appear.

In keeping with Wallace’s swift
turnover,D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace,Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,
arrives alongside a flurry of other rapidly produced Wallace-related books, and
at only around 300 pages, it’s all over much too soon. Not employing the
breakneck overwhelm of Wallace’s include-every-possible-detail-and-reflection
style, Max instead reins in an amazing amount of material into a surprisingly
concise narrative. In addition to consulting all of Wallace’s voluminous drafts
and notebooks, Max was afforded unprecedented access to Wallace’s vast
correspondence—to friends, family, girlfriends, teachers, editors, and fellow
writers—and most of these people granted him extremely candid interviews as
well, consigning to Max a kaleidoscopic but also sharply outlined portrait of
one of our era’s most brilliant and troubled writers.

Just a few pages into this biography’s
revealing portrayal, any Wallace fan will quickly realize that this is
Wallace’s worst nightmare: exposure. A profoundly depressed, anxious,
self-conscious, and shame-ridden man, Wallace was a mass of tics and habits and
neuroses that he very successfully hid from the public by channeling it all
into his compulsive writing and by representing himself as the serene author
who’d conquered all his demons in the pages of his books. Suffering
from depression is nothing to be ashamed of, but being ashamed is
unfortunately one of the disease’s most crippling symptoms, and Wallace would
have shriveled up with more horror than Hal Incandenza at a college admissions
interviewif he were to have seen all of his
manias and foibles and repeatedly unlearned lessons spread out for all of his readers
to ponder in this unflinching biography.

For the first hundred pages or so,Every Love Story is a Ghost Storydoes an impressive job of sifting
through all the interviews and records and recounting it all in a clear and
steady voice, Max’s judicious choices in focus and pacing giving the reader a
streamlined and lucid understanding of Wallace’s early personality and
life-experience in suburban middle America. In many respects, Wallace was a
typical product of his times, but with two rigorously intellectual academics
for parents, he was also encouraged to regard himself with adult-like rights
and responsibilities and was expected to live up to the standards that such
responsibilities placed upon him. In a different child, such as Wallace’s sister,
Amy, this might have resulted in a well-informed and well-rounded sense of
self, but for a child as nervous and insecure and fundamentally unwell as
Wallace, it bloomed into a narcissistic neediness that caused him to depend
upon wild over-achievement in order to feel any self-worth at all. When he
couldn’t perform to the utmost extent, or when he merelyfearedinability when taking on outlandish
loads, he simply crumbled.

As Wallace begins to find a satisfying
outlet for self-expression in writing fiction, Max zeroes in and applies an
exceptionally keen literary understanding to each of Wallace’s artistic phases
and incarnations. Max knows Wallace’s work as well as any fellow writer or
critic, and he also demonstrates a deep knowledge of Wallace’s contemporaries
and influences, and he makes nearly pitch-perfect evaluations of each of
Wallace’s works, including where each of them fit into the larger literary
scene. Thus we learn that, contrary to all of Wallace’s protestations that he
hadn’t readThe Crying of Lot
49before writingThe Broom of the System, the
young writer had in truth latched onto Thomas Pynchon in college as a kind of
revelation (even pinning up a photograph of the rarely photographed Pynchon
onto his wall) and wrote deeply under his influence (or in rebellion against
his influence) for much of his career. Wallace was often obsessed by the
dialogue that he felt he was in with the state of literary art, and Max very
astutely limns all of the specific writers (Barth, Gass, Ellis, etc.) whose
works Wallace’s early stories either mimicked or parodied or attempted to
abnegate.

Max also examines how Wallace’s
literary and philosophical ideas both fueled and hindered his growth as a writer
and as a person. Wallace was consumed with ideas in a way that was frequently
unhelpful and unhealthy, and his often ludicrous literary rules about how
fiction had to be a certain thing—or more oftennota certain thing—led him down paths
that at times he couldn’t back out from, his self-worth hinging on mental
concepts that sometimes did and sometimes didn’t bear fruit. Happily for
Wallace and the rest of the world, his concerns merged with his natural
creative gifts to find a brilliant consummation inInfinite Jest, but in
channeling himself into the specific project ofThe Pale King—a scheme that by
its design couldn’t be dramatized in any effective or compelling manner given
Wallace’s specific talents and style—he allowed his rules to determine and
limit what he could achieve, which for Wallace unfortunately also determined
and limited what he felt he was worth as a person. As anyone who’s readInfinite Jestknows, Wallace had a
rehabilitative agenda that bordered on the messianic, and like Dostoyevsky, the
idol that he replaced Pynchon with, Wallace in later life became profoundly
moralistic in his rules about what his writing needed to accomplish, and
anything short of rapturous success would mean utter failure.

Max covers all of this extremely well,
but as the biography leans more into Wallace’s writing, it begins to lose its
task as a biography. The first third of the book works to portray Wallace’s
life among his various milieux quite vividly—from his family to his tennis
teammates to his college friends—but as soon as Wallace’s writing comes to the
fore, Max begins to forget to do the job of choosing his sources and continuing
the textural narrative, and he increasingly quotes Wallace at length and simply
lets the quotes do the talking. There are very few quotes that are in
themselves uninteresting or out of place, but Max is clearly incapable of
effectively pruning Wallace, and as the text proceeds, the quotes become more
and more unwieldy and off topic while the biographical fabric slowly loses its
integral thread. No relationship in the dozen years afterInfinite Jestgets the close biographical
treatment of Wallace’s college friendships, and although many of these later
relationships are just Wallace repeating his old patterns, they’re all
important and worth dwelling upon closely—especially his relationship with his
wife, which seemed to be a very new and very different step for Wallace—but
instead it’s all rushed through in a way that seems as if Max just wanted to
get the book finished in 300 pages without maintaining the level of its
early focus and without the difficult decision-making that its narrative and
personal texture required.

Max’s greatest mischaracterization,
however, is in his last line. After a year of struggling to change medications,
Wallace lived in such excruciating pain that he twice attempted suicide and
finally succeeded, having not been able to find any measure of safety within
himself, and also having failed to complete The Pale King. Max writes,
“This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he
had chosen.” How can Max think, after detailing so many years of profound
mental illness, that Wallace “chose” suicide? In Wallace’s case, it was so
clearly the most desperate escape from pain, made by a mind so out of control
that it could hardly make any kind of informed “choice,” and Max’s poorly
considered words leave a terribly bitter taste at the end of this biography.
Just as it would be wrong to think that it was Wallace’s wild intellectual notions that led
him into sickness (rather than the other way around), it’s incredibly tasteless
to suggest that any mental process other than the deepest mental illness could
have led Wallace to commit suicide.

Max’s subtitle for this biography is
“A Life of David Foster Wallace,” and, true to its word, this book is
undoubtedly destined to be “a” life rather than “the” life of its subject. Max
has done a great service in bringing all of his sources together and by doing
so much excellent original groundwork himself, and his evaluation and interpretation
of Wallace’s literary life is likely to stand for some time to come, but
Wallace deserves much more than this. With all of its flaws, this book is still
a positive contribution that sincerely helps readers understand a complex and
sometimes mystifying human being, and like Richard Ellmann’s biography of James
Joyce, it even helps us read that human being’s works. But surely
someday a true biographer, with all of the biographer’s necessary skills and
talents, will come along to write the definitive life of David Foster Wallace.—David Wiley